Post-writing and post-reading lead to post-literacy

A
Charles Sturt University (CSU) academic says the anxiety about arts funding in
Australia, and how this affects writers in particular, should be cause for
concern about national literacy.

Senior
lecturer in English in the CSU School
of Humanities and Social Sciences in Bathurst Dr Suzie Gibson (pictured) said the recent
job cuts at Fairfax Media newspapers have further heightened concerns.

"The
printed broadsheet is now a dinosaur, just as traditional books are starting to
look like alien forms in English classrooms," Dr Gibson said.

"It
is no surprise then that one of Australia's most respected writers, Frank Moorhouse, is
now lamenting the fact that he is poor. In the most recent edition of one of
Australia's few surviving literary journals – Meanjin – he writes about being broke after half a century of working
as a journalist, screenwriter and novelist.

"In
response, Ben Eltham, writing in the Sydney
Review of Books, asserts that Moorhouse's dire financial situation reflects
very poorly on the 'state of Australian letters'."

Dr
Gibson said the quixotic notion that writing alone could ever earn the majority
of writers an adequate living has always been dubious.

"Most
writers, even great ones, have had to eke out an existence through finding
alternative means of income. The great modernist writer Joseph Conrad toiled on
shipping vessels in the early part of his career, while for 18 years
Australia's Nobel Prize winning novelist Patrick White sold flowers, vegetables
and milk.

"Late
nineteenth century American novelist Henry James never had money worries because
he was born into wealth. The fact that he indulged in crafting infamously
difficult novels that were never commercial successes therefore hardly mattered
to him."

Dr
Gibson observed that in this era of post-industrialism crossed with globalisation,
new and seasoned writers have to get used to the fact that our not-so very
brave new world has fostered a largely non-reading public that interfaces with
email, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram every day, but rarely with longer or
weightier forms of literature.

"Although
the digital sphere may have given birth to new kinds of reading and writing − mostly
of the shorthand kind − it has also cultivated an inattentive and distracted
reader," she said.

"For
anyone teaching in the tertiary sector over the last 10 to 20 years it has
become abundantly clear that reading resilience is a real and urgent problem.
Literacy levels have fallen, leading to the development of subjects that teach
university-level students basic writing skills.

"The
overlap between reading and writing cannot be overstated. A good writer is a
committed reader. However, there is unlikely to be a mass movement back to
the reading of books when our iPhones seem to have something more
entertaining to offer.

"Contemporary
sub-Orwellian phrases such as 'fake news' and 'alternative facts' are bandied about
in what might be termed a 'post-truth' era. Well, perhaps we have crossed
another border by entering into a 'post-literacy' phase, where libraries are
ridding themselves of paper books."

Dr
Gibson stressed that reading involves somewhat intangible work that requires
time and commitment.

"It
might feel that the actions of 'tweeting' or 'liking' are more work-intensive,
perhaps because they are more obviously 'activities' − actions that reach out
directly into a public sphere. Reading, on the contrary, is a mostly private,
silent project of self-fulfilment.

"Frank
Moorhouse's predicament is unsettling because he is an established man of
letters who at 78 years-of-age is struggling to make ends meet. One would like
to think that such an articulate and versatile writer has earned a comfortable
retirement, even though the true writer, like the true reader, in reality never
reaches an end point.

"Clearly, however, in this post-literate age, more and
more of our literary heroes are likely to be falling on hard times."